Are Your Comments Being Filtered as Spam at ProBlogger?

A number of ProBlogger readers have been emailing me of late to say that comments that they are leaving here are not appearing and that it seems they are being marked as spam incorrectly.

I use Akismet and have noticed this happening a little more than normal lately. I’ve talked to the team at Akismet and they have told me that my blog is in the top few in terms of quantities of comment spam and that as a result there have been a few more false positives than normal. Due to the thousands of spam comments that they filter each day it was impossible for me to scan through them all looking for such mistakes.

If your comments have been filtered out in this way could you please let me know. I just noticed that Akismet have added a search function which allows me to search for email addresses, URLs, names etc. Of course I need to know what I’m looking for – so if your comments are being filtered here please contact me with the name, email address and URL that you use in comments and I’ll look for them and mark them as ‘not spam’ which hopefully will fix the issue.

Feel free to test whether you’re being marked as spam by leaving a comment below.

I’m not sure when the search functionality was added to Akismet (it could have been there for weeks as I’m not one for details) but it’s a welcome feature!

update: I should also mention that in addition to Akismet I also have some manual moderation to do – particularly for first time commenters who all go into the queue for my manual moderation. So if this is your first comment it doesn’t mean you are being filtered as spam. If in doubt – contact me.

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Nope. Never had this problem. Recently I added Bad Behavior plugin in addition to spam karma and akismet.
That has kept spam down to almost zero in addition to a cool contact form plugin.
Yes Bad behavior did knock out some comments. But since there were only 10 to look through, I did not have miss out on comments.
Don’t know what SK2 and Akismet marked as spam. Impossible to go through 100’s of spam daily.

I use Akismet too and recently, I’ve been getting quite a bit more spam. One day I got 9 come though in an hour that Akismet missed. Now that’s not a lot, but compared to the 0 that I normally get with Akismet, 9 was a lot. ;)

Often, I feel like the comments I read on here actually *are* spam — i.e., they’re comments that are nothing but some snippet of somebody else’s blog piggybacking on your posts, written purely in an effort to boost the Google ranking of the other blog. You write “X” and then somebody posts a comment that says “Darren wrote X.” It’s not really a comment at all — it’s just a feeble excuse to create a link.

When that happens you should also make sure to give the false positives some love. I think they use Bayesian filters like any other spam filters so it’s just as important to “unspam” comments marked as spam.

It seems I can’t find the comments I left here before. Let me try if this one can be found.

By the way, within 3 months of the launch of our blog, the spam comments have been increasing rapidly, from a few per day now to over 100 per day. It’s time we consider using one of the spam filters suggested here.

Darren,
I was one of those who e-mailed you. My problem was not with the comments I posted but with the pingbacks. I reffered to your articles on my blog in the past. But since I e-mailed you I have not commented on your blog, so here it goes…

I have been a regular visitor/reader of your blog and a not-so-regular commenter (Ahem!). I have noticed that almost always my comments do not get posted right away and it takes time (sometimes it has taken quite a bit) for my comments to appear. I’d assume that they are being manually moderated. While I am happy just to be able to read my comments on your blog, I’d love for them to appear faster. I kinda get anxious at times.

Nevertheless, I appreciate the fact that you care about your reader community that leaves regular comments on your blog.

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[…] Update 1/18/07 4:34am PST: And here’s Darren Rowse from Problogger expressing concern over Akismet’s spam filtering (emphasis mine): I use Akismet and have noticed this happening a little more than normal lately. I’ve talked to the team at Akismet and they have told me that my blog is in the top few in terms of quantities of comment spam and that as a result there have been a few more false positives than normal. Related PostsOver 90% of blog comments are spam, reports AkismetAkismet first catch a false positiveMullenweg on Comment spam […]